In support of FET, I have heard the argument that objects would go flying sideways if the earth was truly a spinning ball. Similarly, that pressurised gas requires a container and so this concept of an ‘atmosphere’ is nonsense. These are from instagram and facebook, so I’m not saying they are the best arguments, but I’m seeing them used a lot, so assume the majority of Flat Earthers see them as good arguments.

HOWEVER. On the Flat Earth Society wiki, Universal Acceleration and the principle of equivalence are used to describe how we are/could be being ‘pushed up’, like when you are in a car which is accelerating. There is some decent physics here. Much better than the stuff I’m seeing on social media.

The very fact that Acceleration is needed to explain the phenomena we normally call ‘gravity’, shows that there is a universal and verifiable phenomena in which some one (or thing) on or within a moving object of a constant speed (i.e. NON-ACCELERATING) would move along with the object without experiencing a push or pull sensation. That is why, people and trees and things don’t go flying off a ball if it is spinning at a constant rate. Therefore, the argument I quoted in the first sentence is debunked, even using the physics expounded by Flat Earth Theory itself (on this website, at least).

If I am wrong about this contradiction, please say so. I don’t pretend to know everything this is just something I think I have noticed.

If I am right, and you see the contradiction amongst Flat Earther arguments, what do you think about them?

In support of FET, I have heard the argument that objects would go flying sideways if the earth was truly a spinning ball. Similarly, that pressurised gas requires a container and so this concept of an ‘atmosphere’ is nonsense. These are from instagram and facebook, so I’m not saying they are the best arguments, but I’m seeing them used a lot, so assume the majority of Flat Earthers see them as good arguments.

HOWEVER. On the Flat Earth Society wiki, Universal Acceleration and the principle of equivalence are used to describe how we are/could be being ‘pushed up’, like when you are in a car which is accelerating. There is some decent physics here. Much better than the stuff I’m seeing on social media.

The very fact that Acceleration is needed to explain the phenomena we normally call ‘gravity’, shows that there is a universal and verifiable phenomena in which some one (or thing) on or within a moving object of a constant speed (i.e. NON-ACCELERATING) would move along with the object without experiencing a push or pull sensation. That is why, people and trees and things don’t go flying off a ball if it is spinning at a constant rate. Therefore, the argument I quoted in the first sentence is debunked, even using the physics expounded by Flat Earth Theory itself (on this website, at least).

If I am wrong about this contradiction, please say so. I don’t pretend to know everything this is just something I think I have noticed.

If I am right, and you see the contradiction amongst Flat Earther arguments, what do you think about them?

I think (well, I hope) most flat earthers understand the reason we don't fly off into space is because of gravity on our model. The centrifugal force is literally hundreds of times lesser than the gravitational force. Just like we wouldn't feel the force of the Earth accelerating at 9.8m/s^2 since we are moving relative to the Earth. Like a moving vehicle, toss a ball into the air and it'll stay in the same position and won't travel to the back of the car at whatever speed the vehicle is moving.

"We are not here to directly persuade anyone [...] You mistake our lack of interest in you for our absence."-Pete Svarrior

"We are extremely popular and the entire world wants to talk to us. We have better things to do with our lives than have in depth discussions with every single curious person. You are lucky to get one sentence dismissals from us"-Tom Bishop

It is statistical that 97 in 100 people have no idea about how an airplane or a bird flies.More than 95 in 100 doesn't know the cycle of rain.More than 95 still thinking plants and trees are the responsible for the oxygen on the planet.More than 98 have no idea why it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter.Less than 1% can tell you by memory the names of the chemical elements Na, Ag, Au, Cu, S.Less than 1% heard any of the following expressions; "NPN, If-Then-Else, Sin(x), nanosecond, 50ml, v=d/t"Less than 1% can understand how to calculate with 9.8m/s².Less than 1% can tell you the 5 decimal digits of PI number.Less than 5% have no idea what PI is used for.Less than 1% can tell you the value of hypotenuse of a isosceles right triangle with sides equal to 1Less than 1% can tell you the square root of 2 or 3For lots of people "tangent" may be a colorLots of people still believing in ghosts, spirits and supernaturalLess than 1% can tell you how many cubic cm into a 1 cubic meterVery few can calculate the area of a circle Less than 1% knows how may pieces are in a chess game board.Less than 1% knows what Tegucigalpa is and where it can be found, not knowing if it is a city, a lake or a fruit's name.A very little percentage of the world's population ever entered into an airplane, much less traveled to another country.Less than 1% knows how an air conditioned, fridge or freezer unit works.Less than 2% knows the function of pancreas in the human body.Very few people will know where Hydrocarbons can be found.Very few use 10 fingers on a computer keyboard.Very few read at least one book per year.

This is why we, humans, institucionalize schools and teachers, research and scientific development, trying to perpetuate knowledge and even improve it.This is why there are scientists, universities, technology development, health and food improvement.

The stupid and ignorants are easy pray for any wrong information and manipulation, bad guys knows it, and use it for their own gain and profit. It is no surprise why most of the world's population still poor, hungry and sick.

Lots of people do not have a minimum idea where North direction is, or even read a map on paper. Do you really expect them to have a 3D mental mechanic visualization capability to understand the universe, gravity, elliptic orbit, shadow projections, photons and radiation path and refraction, stars, space and time, etc? They have no idea even what "elliptic" means. They can not understand.

For those people, if you promise them "a diploma, or making part of a group" without needing to think, learn, use a calculator, study, etc, just by following you, and listening to you saying "believe me, I know it", they will follow you easy, they will pile up to share your "knowledge without efforts". That is how humanity is behaving for thousands of years. The worst atractors are the ones without any logical of scientific explanations, you just need to believe, and that's it. On purpose they don't explain by numbers just to have an easy escape route in case of any contesting. If you state your home has 2000 square feet facing north, it is better to have it right, somebody may prove you wrong and a liar. But if you say "my home is big, facing the wind"... you can always get rid of someone trying to prove you wrong. A nasty trick used by many crooks.

One of the best things I learn in life was that people are not the same. If you learn something a little more than your neighbor, congratulations, but you will be along with few ones in this universe. You can try to teach your neighbor, but don't expect that he will be capable to understand a single word you say, or worse, he may not even want to hear you. For lots of people, the act of "thinking" hurts, it is difficult, tiresome, even boring.

Science and experience proves that to build a bridge or a building you need to do a lot of calculations, it could not be done only by guessing and believing.

Not really. Even so, everybody at some point of academic life did in fact learn how to calculate hypotenuse from a rectangle triangle, how many from those really remember that? Some even did learn how to calculate integrals, some became scientists or teachers, not everyone. Most of people just went to school because there is a normal path, not because they wanted to learn. Example, all US teens at some point did learn few years of Spanish at High School, ask people around you (not Hispanic descendants, or even them) to say "this is a wonderful sunny morning" in Spanish. All adult Americans that I know and already had a conversation about different languages, remember how to say "holla" in Spanish, nothing else. Most of them had no interest to learn it, in their brain this learning had no future use, so they just learn enough to have the tests grades, nothing else, and immediately forgot about it. I would guess that more than 70% of the average people hate math, biology and sciences, and now as adults none of those remember how to calculate the volume of a sphere or the factorial of 4, or the sulfuric acid chemical composition. People are not the same, they may looks like the same, their brain, memory and inner working differ very much, and that makes a huge difference. Square root of 3 is a simple test to ask around, make your own statistics. Don't even try to ask about the speed of light, that would be overboard for most people.

Questions 261, 273 and 299 are absurdly pure ignorance, no answer. There are few continents in this world, each one has its own great mountain, some very well known; Everest, K2, Namcha. The Aconcagua was even depicted on a Disney movie about South America, the small animated airplane trying to overcome it. Anyone that paid attention in science class remember the name Anemometer. Christiaan Barnard the first heart transplant surgeon, had plenty of publishing on the media, impossible no one knows his name. Just one in four knew the name "odometer" for the car's distance (not only mileage as stated, jeez...). If some math or science questions would be there, a disaster. The test say "general information"... hmm.

It is statistical that 97 in 100 people have no idea about how an airplane or a bird flies.More than 95 in 100 doesn't know the cycle of rain.More than 95 still thinking plants and trees are the responsible for the oxygen on the planet.More than 98 have no idea why it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter.Less than 1% can tell you by memory the names of the chemical elements Na, Ag, Au, Cu, S.Less than 1% heard any of the following expressions; "NPN, If-Then-Else, Sin(x), nanosecond, 50ml, v=d/t"Less than 1% can understand how to calculate with 9.8m/s².Less than 1% can tell you the 5 decimal digits of PI number.Less than 5% have no idea what PI is used for.Less than 1% can tell you the value of hypotenuse of a isosceles right triangle with sides equal to 1Less than 1% can tell you the square root of 2 or 3For lots of people "tangent" may be a colorLots of people still believing in ghosts, spirits and supernaturalLess than 1% can tell you how many cubic cm into a 1 cubic meterVery few can calculate the area of a circle Less than 1% knows how may pieces are in a chess game board.Less than 1% knows what Tegucigalpa is and where it can be found, not knowing if it is a city, a lake or a fruit's name.A very little percentage of the world's population ever entered into an airplane, much less traveled to another country.Less than 1% knows how an air conditioned, fridge or freezer unit works.Less than 2% knows the function of pancreas in the human body.Very few people will know where Hydrocarbons can be found.Very few use 10 fingers on a computer keyboard.Very few read at least one book per year.

This is why we, humans, institucionalize schools and teachers, research and scientific development, trying to perpetuate knowledge and even improve it.This is why there are scientists, universities, technology development, health and food improvement.

The stupid and ignorants are easy pray for any wrong information and manipulation, bad guys knows it, and use it for their own gain and profit. It is no surprise why most of the world's population still poor, hungry and sick.

Lots of people do not have a minimum idea where North direction is, or even read a map on paper. Do you really expect them to have a 3D mental mechanic visualization capability to understand the universe, gravity, elliptic orbit, shadow projections, photons and radiation path and refraction, stars, space and time, etc? They have no idea even what "elliptic" means. They can not understand.

For those people, if you promise them "a diploma, or making part of a group" without needing to think, learn, use a calculator, study, etc, just by following you, and listening to you saying "believe me, I know it", they will follow you easy, they will pile up to share your "knowledge without efforts". That is how humanity is behaving for thousands of years. The worst atractors are the ones without any logical of scientific explanations, you just need to believe, and that's it. On purpose they don't explain by numbers just to have an easy escape route in case of any contesting. If you state your home has 2000 square feet facing north, it is better to have it right, somebody may prove you wrong and a liar. But if you say "my home is big, facing the wind"... you can always get rid of someone trying to prove you wrong. A nasty trick used by many crooks.

One of the best things I learn in life was that people are not the same. If you learn something a little more than your neighbor, congratulations, but you will be along with few ones in this universe. You can try to teach your neighbor, but don't expect that he will be capable to understand a single word you say, or worse, he may not even want to hear you. For lots of people, the act of "thinking" hurts, it is difficult, tiresome, even boring.

Science and experience proves that to build a bridge or a building you need to do a lot of calculations, it could not be done only by guessing and believing.

Those statistics are honestly very sad, if true. I've heard that 6% of America believes the Earth is flat. And that half of American adults believe that 9/11 is part of some conspiracy. On top of that, I've heard that about 15% of people in the UK believe chemtrails exist too. Frightening.

"We are not here to directly persuade anyone [...] You mistake our lack of interest in you for our absence."-Pete Svarrior

"We are extremely popular and the entire world wants to talk to us. We have better things to do with our lives than have in depth discussions with every single curious person. You are lucky to get one sentence dismissals from us"-Tom Bishop

Questions 261, 273 and 299 are absurdly pure ignorance, no answer. There are few continents in this world, each one has its own great mountain, some very well known; Everest, K2, Namcha. The Aconcagua was even depicted on a Disney movie about South America, the small animated airplane trying to overcome it. Anyone that paid attention in science class remember the name Anemometer. Christiaan Barnard the first heart transplant surgeon, had plenty of publishing on the media, impossible no one knows his name.

I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I don't have an interest in mountains and I haven't seen this movie about this mountain, I don't remember being taught about anemometers in science class, and I don't remember reading any news articles about the first heart transplant. Even if I have come across these before, is there a good reason that I should have committed these names to memory? I don't think that not being able to recall useless facts about topics I have no interest in is "ignorance".

In response to Simone's post, I think it's important to highlight that plenty of Flat Earthers on social media (especially Twitter) are not very fond of the Flat Earth Society. We have significant ideological differences with other Flat Earth groups, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it may go some way towards explaining the seeming contradiction.

It's more or less the same as any interest group - the term "Flat Earther" is too broad to capture a well-defined group. I'm sure some of us understand mainstream science quite well, others are completely clueless, and then you have everything in-between.

It's more or less the same as any interest group - the term "Flat Earther" is too broad to capture a well-defined group.

Don't you find this odd? Being flat is not such a special property, actually it's a very clear one, but then instead of uniting in proving that, FEs divide on other silly and irrelevant details. Who cares if there's a dome or not. Do we really need to explain gravity in other ways? The current FEs experiments are not enough to percolate society, but if new, deal-breaking, ones were performed they would convince a good deal of people and, with the new funding, other smaller details could be explored too.

Quote from: Pete Svarrior

these waves of smug RE'ers are temporary. Every now and then they flood us for a year or two in response to some media attention, and eventually they peter out. In my view, it's a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

I don't, you simply apply an unfair standard. I've spoken to RE'ers who don't understand the difference between velocity and acceleration. I've spoken to RE'ers who think the Sun orbits the Earth. And ones who think that the Earth is so excessively curved that you can easily capture it with a photograph taken at ground level. Does that mean that RE'ers "diverge"? No, there's just a lot of idiots on the Internet. Do I find this "odd"? Not in the slightest.

There's is a lot of ignorance on both sides. People, in general, suck at understanding science.So the answer to the question "does the lay Flat Earther understand Physics" is no, but neither do many lay RE people.

I think the difference is the RE model is well established and accepted amongst scientists. People may not understand it, but the basic concepts of the earth orbiting the sun, the moon orbiting the earth and the earth rotating but tilted on its axis are not still being debated in the scientific community. In the FE community there are still quite fundamental debates going on - is there a physical dome? Is UA a thing? How high is the sun? Are there two poles or just one?These are quite fundamental things which there doesn't seem to be much consensus about.